Tutor Handbooks: Heuristic Texts for Negotiating Difference in a Globalized World
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Date
2012
Authors
Bailey, Steven K.
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I would like to begin this article by telling a true
story. When I was a graduate student earning my
doctoral degree, I worked in a writing center on a
midsized and predominantly white university campus.
Every week I attended and sometimes facilitated the
writing center’s tutor education workshop. At one of
these meetings, an undergraduate tutor from a Euro-
American background said that one of the things she
liked about working at the writing center was that if
she had a question about grammar during a
conference with a client, she could simply lean over to
the next table and ask another tutor for advice. In
response to this statement, an African-American tutor
said that she would never ask another tutor for
grammar help because she felt that doing so would
undermine her authority and lead clients to question
her competence in Standard American English. At this
point a bilingual Asian-American tutor said that clients
often doubted her ability to tutor based solely on her
appearance. For many of her American clients she was
too foreign, while for many of her international clients
she was not American enough. This discussion was a
revelation for many of the Euro-American tutors,
since it had never occurred to them that one’s physical
appearance could bring his or her linguistic
competence into question. All of the tutors learned a
great deal from this remarkable discussion, and the
theory and practice of the writing center shifted in
ways that more fully accounted for the experiences of
tutors from diverse backgrounds.
I tell this story for two reasons.